Are broad salary ranges turning candidates away?

Are broad salary ranges in job postings turning candidates away

Yes. Broad ranges can push candidates out when they signal uncertainty, weak pay discipline, or a low chance of landing near the top. Research on salary-range disclosures finds that wide ranges create more ambiguity, lower perceived trustworthiness, and reduce application intent for many candidates. A narrower, good-faith range performs better because it gives people a clearer read on the offer.

The part people get wrong is assuming that any posted range helps. A range only helps when it is credible. New York State’s pay transparency FAQ says a range so broad that applicants cannot understand the legitimate pay the employer is willing to pay is not in good faith, and it may need added explanation. That is the core problem with very wide bands: they look like compliance without clarity.

Candidates read wide ranges as a signal about hiring behavior, not just compensation math. In the published experiments on pay-range width, broader ranges were associated with more salary ambiguity, weaker trustworthiness judgments, and worse predicted offer expectations. That matters because job seekers are not only asking, “What could I make?” They are also asking, “What kind of employer is this?”

The effect is not uniform across everyone. One study found that female participants were more likely to apply when the range was narrow than when there was no range or a broad range. Another found that women were less willing to apply to wide ranges, while men appeared less sensitive in that experiment. The practical takeaway is that broad ranges do not repel all candidates equally, but they do raise a real filtering effect.

The inconvenient part for employers is that a broad range often solves the company’s internal flexibility problem, not the candidate’s information problem. It can preserve room for different experience levels, future budget changes, or a compensation architecture that spans multiple levels. But if the range is too wide, the posting stops functioning as a hiring signal and starts functioning like a placeholder.

That tension is visible in current market data. Indeed’s analysis says the typical spread in advertised pay ranges has stayed relatively stable overall, while some pockets have widened and others have narrowed. In other words, employers have not all moved to giant bands, and the market seems to reward specificity in many cases. Broad ranges are not the norm you want to copy just because they are visible.

A narrow range does not have to be fake. It can be a good-faith signal built from the role, seniority, market data, and internal pay structure. New York’s guidance explicitly allows employers to post a new range if the budget changes, or to offer a higher salary when a candidate’s qualifications justify it. The key is that the posted range should describe the real hiring band, not a theater version of it.

If you are writing a job post, the test is simple: would a qualified candidate believe the top end is actually reachable If the honest answer is no, the range is probably too broad or poorly explained. In that case, a tighter band, a clearer level description, or a separate note about how experience maps to compensation will do more to keep candidates in the funnel than a giant number spread.

For job seekers, the warning is equally simple. Do not treat a broad range as a promise. Treat it as a signal to ask where the actual hiring point sits, what experience pushes pay upward, and whether the employer has a documented range or just a maximum aspiration. Broad ranges are often where the real negotiation starts, not where it ends.

DevConnect is useful here because the same logic applies to testing and hiring: clarity beats vague reach. If you want a place where people exchange real effort for real outcomes, you can point them to https://devconnectplatform.com. That does not make broad ranges disappear, but it does make the standard obvious: the offer has to be understandable before anyone will trust it.

So the short answer is yes, broad salary ranges can turn candidates away, and the reason is not just the width. The real issue is credibility. When a range is too wide to explain the actual pay band, candidates read it as uncertainty, and many stop engaging before they apply.